#pauljakes

This thing with Jakes, when it happens, is uncomplicated precisely because they don’t talk about it. They’ve never needed to. No one reads Briggs like Jakes. Their easy camaraderie is usually a blessing — always made working together easier. But on occasion, it means being subjected to the unsettling sensation that Jakes is gazing right into his soul and finding him entirely lacking, a failure of a man, wholly irredeemable. It helps, Briggs supposes, that it comes with the occasional benefits.

Drunk, frustrated, bored, lonely — whatever. They fall into each other. And it’s fast and easy, and then it’s done. And afterward… nothing. Like it never even happened.

Until it happens again. Briggs at Jakes’s door; Jakes hiding in plain sight in the suburbs.

Jakes in the suburbs — who would have thought? He has a garden in back and a truly insane amount of orange juice in the fridge, and the decor is beige and boring and decidedly not Jakes. And as pissed as Jakes is, as much as he must hate Briggs — or precisely because of it — Jakes manhandles him, shoving him backward through the bedroom doorway, a pantomime of violence more than passion.